Camestros Felapton

FELAPTONL

Weird Internet Ideas: Bad Demographic Reasoning aka It’s Petunias all the way down…

The reliable dull online magazine Quillette has a piece entitled ‘A Glimpse Into the Ideological Monoculture of Literary New York’ In it a writer describes how he had spiffing idea for a novel, which he then wrote and which then publishers didn’t immediately fawn all over his brilliance.

“But if you’re wondering why so many of the literary books that are now being published cater to just one narrow sliver of the market, I think my experience over the last two years qualifies as instructive.”

It’s essentially a Puppy-piece but written by what a person they’d regard as their natural enemy: a person engaged with New York’s literary set. I shan’t go into the piece in much detail as others have pulled it apart elsewhere and I nearly ignored it altogether until something caught my eye:

“According to a newly released analysis of U.S. survey data, only 8% of Americans hold views that mark them as “progressive activists”—versus 92% who may be classified as traditional liberals, moderates, conservatives or “politically disengaged.” Yet the high-end literary world, as I have experienced it in New York, would seem to be almost entirely dominated by, or beholden to, that 8% slice of public opinion—especially when it comes to any issue touching upon immigration, capitalism, multiculturalism or feminism.”

Yes! It isn’t just a vague Puppy-style complaint that leftists are somehow stopping a genius author from getting their due recognition, it is also making Dave Freer’s Petunia argument — or at least part of it.

The data the author is linking too is this report: https://camestrosfelapton.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/7341d-hidden_tribes_report-2.pdf

The report itself isn’t great and it’s got some silly spin its results and some of the names it uses for its grouping may create a misleading impression of divisions. Having said that it is essentially the same kind of political typology research I’ve discussed before. A side effect of such research or any kind of attempt to describe how people group politically is to create an impression that such groups are distinct.

In the case of this article the writer seems to follow this bit of fallacious reasoning:

  • I’ve encountered people who think X, Y or Z.
  • X, Y or Z are things ‘progressive activists’ think
  • The people I’ve met are all progressive activists
  • These people only represent 8% of the population politically!

The reasoning is illogical and innumerate.

The political positions and examples he cites were:

  • immigration
  • capitalism
  • multiculturalism
  • feminism

Looking at the actual data in the report showed that for the groups labelled Progressive Activists, Traditional Liberals, Passive Liberals and Moderates, a majority in each group agreed with the statement:

Immigration is good for America, helping sectors of our economy to be more successful and competitive

Across all the groups 51% agreed with the statement. Its actually what most people think (just) rather than a lowly 8%, at least according to the report he cited.

64% of the people across all groups supported the statement:

Undocumented immigrants who arrived as children and grown up here should be protected from deportation and given the chance to earn citizenship

54% across all groups supported this statement:

Today’s feminists fight for important issues

52% across all groups supported this statement:

Many white people today don’t recognize the real advantages they have

And so on. I couldn’t find a question on ‘capitalism’ per-se but progressive views on immigration, multiculturalism, feminism, the dangers of Islamophobia, or disliking Donald Trump are actually common-place in the US according to the data cited. They aren’t confined to ‘progressive activists’ and the report cited didn’t claim that (although it did spin things in that direction).

The groupings where such beliefs were stronger than average constituted somewhere between 34% to 50% of the population (depending on what we include). What distinguished the the ‘progressive activists’ was the extent to which they were likely to vote, contribute, volunteer or protest for causes.

camestrosfelapton

28 responses to “Weird Internet Ideas: Bad Demographic Reasoning aka It’s Petunias all the way down…”

  1. Wow, that white dude author sure has some massive sour grapes!

    Did it maybe occur to him that the reason several publishers didn’t want to publish his book was because it was not very good or at least not good enough to publish? And that maybe they came up with excuses like “readers don’t want any more male voices”, because they don’t want to deal with an outraged snowflake author after he’s been told, “Your book is crap”?

    Liked by 4 people

    • Yeah, I suspect what they were really trying to tell him was “readers don’t want any more mediocre books by male voices”, but they knew that telling him the truth would have generated exactly this sort of manbaby tantrum.

      Liked by 1 person

    • Some years back MRA Marty Nemko wrote about how he’d written a groundbreaking book revealing schools discriminate against boys, but his publisher told him feminists wouldn’t let the firm publish it. Given that Christine Hoff-Sommers had just published a book on the subject, I think the publisher was just letting Nemko down easy.

      Liked by 3 people

    • Nick Mamatas posted a link to an extract but I can’t find it now. It’s very bad. The first person narrator finds himself being bullied by different AIs in things he owns – all of whom are essentially women hectoring him about things.

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      • Auarrgh, it is written in present tense! Kryptonite! Well, he managed to decrease the number of potention readers already with his first sentence.

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          • OMG, it reads like the notebook jottings of a 14-year-old who’s just found Return of Kings on the internet, which made him “realize” that he’s an MRA. No wonder it got so many rejections.

            Liked by 2 people

      • Ouch, that’s pretty awful. I’m not so much surprised that he got plenty of rejections, but that he found a publisher for that thing at all.

        As for his outrage that someone told him that women don’t much care reading about his protagonist cheating on his wife, most female readers I know have never much cared about the SWM of literature bragging about the implausible sexual conquests of their characters, who are often neither young nor rich nor attractive and yet have twentysomething supermodels falling over the feet to be with them.

        Liked by 2 people

      • Crap, and crap written in first person present — the least favorite tense of readers. He’s lucky he got a contract with anybody. Prose that bad (with such juvenile hurt fee-fees) wouldn’t have been accepted from anyone BUT a SWM, so ironically he’s disproved his point.

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      • Well, that’s crappy. I don’t mind the first person present tense so much–I read a lot of YA, after all–but that is just bad writing.

        Liked by 1 person

      • He’s also got one of the worst author photos I’ve ever seen on his web site. Dude, we get it. You went somewhere exotic. At least I hope you did–it’s actually kind of hard to tell from that photo. But could you at least face the camera? It’s probably too much to ask for you to crop your awkward-looking hands out of the image.

        I like first person present tense. That’s the last of his problems in the excerpt. An infodump in the fourth paragraph? Seriously?

        Finally, you can’t pre-order the damn book from the publisher’s web site. They apparently can’t figure out how to link to Amazon, which will let you pre-order. To be fair, they’re about a year old, but you would think they’d have figured out how to let people buy their products by now.

        Liked by 1 person

    • I guess the advance wasn’t high enough or he didn’t get a book tour, signings and a lavish launch event and Oprah hasn’t callled yet either, so he’d being discriminated against for his straight white maleness, don’t you see?

      Liked by 3 people

  3. By the sheer number of books I observe in my local library that are by right-wing hacks (i.e. Coulter, Souza, Michael Savage, et. al.), it’s painfully clear that there’s a large industry panting to publish books with a ‘conservative’ viewpoint, which leads me to conclude that Cora is right. His work probably sucks.

    Liked by 2 people

    • That’s a different market, though. Conservative *polemics* like those written by Coulter are prominent in part because they sell well, but they’re also often subsidized to some degree by wealthy donors who want to push those views.

      Conservative novelists, on the other hand, are not subsidized and their novels have to sink or swim on their own merits.

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  5. To me, it just looks like outrage marketing for the book, he’ll probably self publish it at some point and then all those people who read the article will buy it to get back at the social justice warrior liberals.

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  6. “But if you’re wondering why so many of the literary books that are now being published cater to just one narrow sliver of the market, I think my experience over the last two years qualifies as instructive.”
    Didn’t read the post but aren’t literary books by definition catering to a narrow sliver?

    Liked by 2 people

    • Nope, “literary” novels are big business and sell to wide audiences of regular book readers. Denoting a work as literary (which can be any genre,) lets you market/publicize to specific channels — the New Yorker, the Times Book Review etc. — as an example of stylish artistry and deep thematic content (literary is an adjective, not a category.) “Literary” novels are regularly bestsellers in retail trade fiction publishing, but there is a holdover from the ways that books used to be distributed until the 1970s and how that used to be symbolized as socioeconomic classes in readers. That holdover is a sales technique that has them still pushing the “literary” novels as academic, for people of refined tastes (the wealthy,) and nowhere selling as well as the “commercial” paperbacks (such as genre bookselling markets that are high action suspense and do a lot of paperback publishing,) as part of the overall image. It is still a standard part of many promo campaigns to the media to push the literary bestsellers as underappreciated gems that break free of the confines of successful commercialism. But it’s frequently lucrative — novels that are considered highly stylist — literary — are usually published first in hardcover and can often get higher initial advances than other works of fiction.

      And the books that usually get denoted and sold as literary have in the majority been by SWM, up until the last few decades. SWM authors got more reviews, interviews and had their work be seen as more important and global, while women writers often had their work dismissed as domestic, romantic and smaller scale with a few exceptions. But that’s been shifting like everything else, and the success of some women considered important and literary voices like Margaret Atwood has a certain segment of the SWM authors rather bitter (as Dana Schwarz skewered so nicely in her Guys in your MFA Twitter feed for several years.)

      The complaint by some SWM authors that book publishing is dominated by (white) women and liberal minority politics casting the manly SWM authors out into the cold has been going on for “literary” publishing since the 1990s, much earlier than the ones in suspense or the Sad Puppies of SFFH. It’s a fear that their musings on their penises and how older women don’t understand them no longer find the dominant place, that they will be rejected if the fiction field does not resemble the 1950s or financial edgelord ethos of the 1980s. And it is also, as has been noted, a useful way to sell books to a narrow sliver of audience willing to buy products that enforce the idea that they are wrestling the main culture back from all those marginalized groups that supposedly took over to grift the culture by publishing and promoting their fiction too. Greater equality always equals oppression to those guys, and because they can’t deal with the symbiosis of the fiction market and how addition and variety helps it grow, they can only see it as a direct competition battling for spots, with their ideology supposedly being rejected.

      Liked by 2 people

  7. Yep. Just like Puppies, he has to salve his childish ego by coming up with Conspiracies By The Other, instead of facing up to the fact that he’s a crappy writer and that’s why his work was rejected.

    Right wingers talk a lot about personal responsibility, but they never do it.

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